Richard was the Neumann brother who had emigrated in 1939 to America. Otto’s words made clear that, ever the patriarch, he was unhappy at not being told that his son had been in hiding during March and April. Nevertheless, he was plainly relieved that Hans had recovered like Richard and managed to escape Prague. It is unclear whether my grandparents were told that Hans had left for Berlin. I imagine that Lotar would have spared his parents that detail, which would have only worried them and endangered Hans. Lotar would have borne well in mind their written pleas at the time to keep safety above all and not to attempt anything where much danger is involved.
It is evident from their continuing letters that in 1943, my grandparents were becoming accustomed to their surroundings and doing their best to create some semblance of a life. Even the deterioration in Ella’s health, resulting initially in hospitalization for stomach ulcers and then an inflamed gallbladder, did not dampen their hopes that the family would soon be reunited. They missed no opportunity to use the letters to pour out their love and gratitude to their boys and to Zdenka.
At the beginning of the year, Otto’s boss had written a reklamatzia, an appeal to the Elders of Terezín. Thanks to this, they had managed to obtain a repeal of Ella’s Weisung, which brought them some relief from the threat of being listed for the next transport to the east and immediate execution. But even without a Weisung, the threat of what they referred to as excursions to camps in the east remained a daily menace. If only the monstrous excursions completely disappeared.
Nonetheless, Otto still seemed to strike notes of optimism. In one letter, he recounted that he caught himself on the way from work crooning Golem, a comic song made famous by Voskovec and Werich, a duo of avant-garde entertainers who had been critical of Nazi ideology. The Golem was a mythical creature reputed to protect the Jews of Prague from anti-Semitism in the sixteenth century.
Both Otto and Ella forged new relationships and engaged in helping others in Terezín. They used their network of helpers, the gendarme and Mrs. Rosa the laundry woman, not only to receive clothes, food, and money but also to get messages to their own and other families outside. Otto established a friendship with Stella Kronberger, a Viennese widow from Prague whose husband had committed suicide the day before their deportation. Otto had also “adopted” a young girl named Olina, whose parents he knew from Libčice. She was alone in the camp, as her father had not been deported by virtue of being in a mixed marriage. However, as a mischling, a person deemed to be of mixed race and over fifteen, she had been interned in Terezín. Otto’s letters often mentioned both Olina and Stella, with whom he spent time, sharing rations and any surplus he received from his illicit packages.
Ella begged her golden ones to write, giving details of their everyday lives in Prague to keep the image she had of them vivid, vital, and current. Not a day, evening, or night passes in which I do not think of you. My only desire is to see you again and reunite our family. She remained focused on the day when they would be together again.
Despite her illnesses and situation, her longing for beautiful things and tendency to coquettishness were intact when the warmth of spring arrived. Ella wrote in mid-April that the budding flowers on the trees make me dream of Libčice. She requested her spring coat, her cork shoes, her face powder, and some perfume. She complained that many of the parcels’ contents had been looted, but clarified that she had received: clothing, food, toiletries, and the shoe polish that was so crucial to maintain the darkness of Otto’s hair. It seems that amid the chaos, illness, overcrowding, hunger, and cold, they found a way to carry on. They forged new friendships, managed to relish small pleasures and find moments of relative peace.
They were not the only ones. Ella’s niece Zita, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of her sister who had died of pneumonia in 1923, had been interned in Terezín since January 1942, yet she managed to fall in love and even marry in the camp.
I first encountered the name Zita while poring over my grandparents’ letters. When Magda the researcher helped me put together a family tree, we discovered that I had living relatives not only in the U.S. but also in France, England, Israel, and the Czech Republic. One of them, from Prague, was Zita’s daughter, Daniela, born in 1948. We met for the first time one evening in October 2017 at the bar of the hotel where I was staying and talked for hours, a bit in French and a bit in English, about our family. Afterward, Daniela sent me a few pages of Zita’s recollections, together with photos of Zita’s mother and father, Rudolf Pollak, and his second wife, Josefa; of her sister, Hana, and her brothers, Zdeněk and Jiří. All of whom were detained in Terezín when Ella arrived. There were pictures of the children lined up in sailor suits and elegant outfits and of Ella’s sister posing proudly with her firstborn son. One photo shows Ella’s nieces and nephew seated happily around their father; it was taken some months before their deportation to Terezín. Still today I am struck by its depiction of shared affection and a moment of careless joy.
Ella’s brother-in-law Rudolf Pollak with his three children: Zita and Hana on the left, and Zdeněk on the right. Teplice, c. 1940.
Rudolf, Josefa, and Jiří Pollak had been deported to Auschwitz in September 1943 on Rudolf’s fifty-ninth birthday, but Zita, Hana, and Zdeněk Pollak provided some respite for my grandparents in the camp. Otto reported, after one of the many moves of barracks, how relieved he was to have Zdeněk in the same bunk. Ella helped her nieces steal some flowers from the trees for Zita’s marriage bouquet.
In her letters of this period, Ella started to refer to Otto as Grumpy. Otto had always been cantankerous, and life in Terezín could only have magnified this. Instead of allowing them to find strength in each other, it appears that life in Terezín had begun to wrench my grandparents apart.
Ella’s relationship with her employer seems to have been a key catalyst for this division. In her first Terezín letters, she often mentioned Eng L. He is very influential. He takes good care of me. He eats out of the palm of my hand.
In the first weeks after his arrival, Otto was also grateful for Engineer Langer’s kindness, which benefited both Ella and him. Otto wrote in early 1943 that he had Langer to thank for his new job, which afforded him some protection from being transported. He suggested that the boys get in touch with Langer’s wife in Prague to give her news of her husband. Otto also asked his sons to offer Mrs. Langerova the opportunity to use their parcels as a conduit for her to send messages to Langer.
But Langer was also the cause of friction that stemmed from Otto’s jealousy. A mere month after his arrival, Otto was scathing: Eng. L is responsible for ruining the family happiness, though I blame Ella above all, as she is not behaving like a normal person. In many instances in the letters that followed, he referred to his failed marriage. Ella repeatedly denied any romantic involvement with anyone and wished Otto could find better ways of expressing his love for her. In March 1943, she wrote about Otto’s jealousy: though he has no reason to be jealous he simply cannot stand that some men with power in Terezín like me and play into my hands. So in this respect I do what I can, my only mission here is to survive at all costs, if it wasn’t for my influential friends we would either be dead or have long been deported far away. She criticized Otto for being petty and senseless and suggested that he should be more focused on important things, such as surviving. In June 1943, she begged her children to not take Otto’s news so tragically and asked Lotar, especially, not to fret about their relationship. There are no circumstances in which you could imagine what life is like in this madhouse. She wrote, as she often did, that her only goal was for her and Otto to survive, while also clarifying that how I achieve this is not irrelevant as I don’t want to return to life outside crippled physically or mentally. While she remained focused on surviving, there were limits to what Ella would do to ensure this survival. This clarification to her boys implied that having an affair fell beyond those limits.